Jack O'Connell - Box Nine

Then six months later, the Vachek door was left just slightly open, the slip bolt pressed against the jamb, just an eighth of an inch from its slot. When Ike began to push some pulpy religious monthly through the brass-rimmed mail slot, the door swung open enough to reveal Milos witnessing the opportunity of a lifetime. He lunged and Ike fell backward in the doorway, just managing to shield his throat with the mailbag. Milos caught an incisor on Ike’s sleeve and shredded the whole arm, but missed any skin. By the grace of God, Mrs. Vachek appeared out of nowhere with some silent whisde in her mouth, her cheeks puffed out to bursting, blowing an inaudible command that Milos grudgingly obeyed.

It was Ike’s only dog incident in eight years with the service, twelve years if you counted the summers he worked while squeaking through Jones University as a day student. If any of his current co-workers ever found out that he had a degree, it would be all over. They’d manage to be as blindly vicious as Milos Vachek and no whistle in the world could call them from his throat.

Now Ike wonders why nothing in college came as easily to him as everything here at the station. Like the zip codes, for instance. Ike knows every zip code in the state, and most of them in the bordering states. You could line him up on some quiz program and just start zinging them his way and he wouldn’t flinch. They’d flow out of his mouth as automatically as meter stickers from the dispenser. He doesn’t think about it. It’s like there’s a direct path from some pure center of his memory straight to his mouth, and no thinking is ever involved. A location is stated and a zip code is kicked out.

This is one of the reasons that Ike is probably the fastest sorter in the place. He can empty a full tray in half the time it takes Rourke. There’s no contest. And if someone were to do a check on accuracy, Ike is confident he’d win that category as well. He doesn’t see any reason for mistakes in this area. To him, a mistake in sorting means only one thing: you were talking to someone instead of looking at the envelope. Not that he’s got anything against socializing. It’s just there’s a time for it. Can’t they wait until the end of their shift and take it over to that stupid bar they all love so much? What the hell is so special about that place?

Does Ike regret not being a part of the gang? Never being asked to go along when they change back into their street clothes? Never heading across the street and filing into the bar, all loose and ready for some fun? Not really. Not usually. There have been some rare occasions — he could probably number them on his fingers — when he found himself longing for this vague idea of friendship that he labels “camaraderie.” He’s imagined, at those times, what it might be like inside the back room at the Bach Room, seated in a chair at a fat, well-worn round table, pouring beer from a pitcher into the half-filled mugs around him, actually laughing at something Rourke has said, whispering into Bromberg’s small ear.

But most of the time he has no desire to be part of their group. He feels set apart from his co-workers, and he swears to himself that this gap has nothing to do with a sense of superiority. It’s just a separateness, pure and simple. If he worked at the main post office downtown, instead of here at a much smaller neighborhood branch, the separateness wouldn’t be as noticeable. He could get lost in the crowd. There are hundreds of people who work at the main station. But here there are usually just six or eight people and there’s just no way to disappear. So his separateness has to be glaringly apparent day in and day out.

There have been a lot of moments, most often at night, like three or four in the morning, when Ike couldn’t sleep, but stayed in bed and stared straight up into the darkness and admitted to himself, filled up with a vague sense of guilt, that he cherished his separateness. He doesn’t think this is normal or wholesome. He has an unspoken theory that most animals, and he stubbornly includes humans in that category, have a primal need for community, a deep well of yearning to be part of a larger social group. He thinks that even outcasts, abnormals, discontents, rebels, nonconformists, whether they admit it or not, secretly long for other outcasts. He thinks that a true hermit is a tremendously rare entity. And that he has all the makings of a true hermit.

He enjoys being alone with his own mind and running it through a series of weird systems. He likes filling up on what would be considered the most trivial of information, because he thinks that there can be no standard for measurement of informational importance, that it’s absolutely subjective. That it’s entirely possible that for him, knowing the zip code of the smallest hamlet in the state is every bit as important as the President knowing the correct code sequence for unleashing a nuclear barrage.

Ike has a hunch that this trait has emerged straight from the Thomas genes, that it’s a shared family legacy. He’d bet that Lenore is engulfed in separateness down at the police station and that she puts a very high value on it. He thinks both of their parents thought of themselves as cut apart from the groupings they moved within, in the neighborhood, at work, at church. He’s decided this based on a collection of memories that he analyzes over and over again while walking the route, or eating a silent lunch, or giving in to the insomnia that plagues him every now and then. He imagines he knows how his parents felt, as if they were living an illusion, bringing off a ridiculously elaborate deception — the deception that people are connected, that they share history, biology, a common tongue.

One of the systems that Ike has spent a lot of time investigating is the post office. His interest began simply as a by-product of his daily routine, his urge to know a little more about an environment he spent most of his time in. But the irony of where he works soon hit him full force. The very idea of a post office is stunning to him. It’s like this national, no, international, planetwide, series of shrines dedicated to an idea of connection, to the notion of real communication. Now Ike sees every post office he passes as a temple, a concrete symbol of insistence that we are not alone, that we can talk to anyone, anywhere, at any time, all for the price of a stamp.

A few years ago, Ike began delving into any and all aspects of the postal service. He’d done a hell of a lot of research, read most of the texts out there on the subject — the classic William Smith volume, the Walter Lang, the Ormsby and the Fallopian. What he loves most, though, is the fact that no one, not his co-workers, not the people on his route, not even Lenore knows about his interest or his knowledge. It’s locked up, hermetically sealed within the vault of his skull. He values all this knowledge, oddly because he knows how useless it is, what a vain display the history of mail service is, what an exhibition of pointless ego. He can’t understand why no one else he’s aware of sees it in this manner. In every book he’s ever read, the mail is a story of progress and practicality.

Just once, Ike would like to come across a book, maybe an old, dilapidated volume, crusted with dust, forgotten, wedged unseen on a rarely visited library shelf, the stamped date on the return card pasted in the back of it showing a day that went by decades ago. He’d like to open that book and find the one shunned author who was willing to tell the truth, like in the story of “The Emperor’s New Clothes.” He’d like to find the voice brave enough to say: I’m sorry, people, you can make the mail system as efficient and elaborate and well connected as you want, but it won’t change a thing. It won’t make you any less isolated, any less separate, any less alone. You can mail an unlimited number of bulging envelopes, filled to bursting with words of every meaning and message, but that can’t change the nature of things. We are alone. And all our post offices are but temples of illusion, intricate attempts to tell ourselves otherwise.